Our journal aims not only to promote the work of contemporary women poets, but also to expose readers to formal poetry by women poets who may once have been well-known, but whose writing may now be difficult to find.

     Our journal's title, Mezzo Cammin, derives most recognizably from the opening line of Dante's Inferno; more immediately, however, we borrow it from "Mezzo Cammin" by Judith Moffett (who, in turn, derived her title and theme from Longfellow as well as from Dante). Moffett's satirical, twenty-three stanza poem about reaching middle age inspires not only through her dexterity in working with rhyme and meter, but leads us to hope, as well, that controversies about how to define "form" have, at last, ripened to middle age. We at Mezzo Cammin therefore expect to take a middle path in our understanding of form by not limiting our definition to "poems written in rhyme, traditional stanza forms, and conventional rhyme and meter." Although such poems will likely predominate in the journal, especially in its early issues, we encourage submissions of poetry, essays, and reviews in which form is understood more liberally, as encompassing a repeatable pattern, of any sort, within a poem. In particular, we believe that women poets, as literary outsiders, have through the centuries been adept at playing with form; a tendency which, as in the case of Emily Dickinson, has sometimes led their work to be viewed skeptically, if at all, by the literary mainstream. At Mezzo Cammin, we hope to explore the variety of formal approaches taken by women writers and to recognize that "experimentation" in poetry is not limited to free verse, but flourishes equally well through poets' innovative handling of forms of repetition.